May I draw your attention to a series of articles currently appearing on page 2 of The Herald & Tribune each day and presenting an analysis of modern France on the grand scale which rings very true with me on a personal level too. I quote from today's offering:

"French thinkers have been caught many times in the past having ideas more or less independant of any empirical basis - prefering lofty Cartesian speculation to fact finding, or expecting reality to conform to concept, rather than the other way round."